18 Months in, a First 5 Recommendations List

A Dream Inspired

Back in early 2014, hearing James Altucher speak and listening to his podcast started me on a journey of getting serious about pursuing the "someday" goals that had always been in my mind but had never really come to much more than daydreams in the past.

From the podcast I began making notes when I would hear authors interviewed whose books on lifestyle creation and breaking out of the conventional rat race resonated with me. I've mentioned previously in the blog that the very first one of these was The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. The book is absolutely inspiring in terms of thinking about possibilities for how you could live your life differently and examples pulled from the author and from many others who have successfully said, "No, thanks!" to tradition and have pursued life a little differently.

A Gap Defined

The one thing that became utterly apparent from the start with Ferriss's book is that the author is a super A-type personality. He is hard-wired to achieve and investigate and experiment and life hack to find the unconventional. But as of 18 months ago, that is a skill I had not yet acquired. A lot of the ideas that the author presents in the book are incredibly seductive, but the rule-constrained, order-following, permission-seeking side that dominates my personality was highly resistant to doing more than dreaming about how I could somehow bring those things to pass in my life.

The one thing that did stick with me from The 4-Hour Workweek is opening my eyes to the possibility that there is something better, different, new, and achievable if I will but reach out and grasp it. It made me hungry to find the pathway to get there from where I was, but I was going to need a few more breadcrumbs to find my way to that trail. So I kept listening to James and I kept making notes and I kept adding books to my collection--and consuming them! The books do no good collecting dust, so I would immediately start on them as soon as I purchased them. In addition to the Tim Ferriss title, I soon had books by James Altucher, Ramit Sethi, Charles D. Ellis and Burton G. Malkiel, Joel Greenblatt, Howard Marks, Matthew Capala, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Brian Tracy, Chris Gillebeau, and David Bach.

A Library in Construction

My collection grew slowly at first, because I was using my two credits per month from Audible to buy a book from the Altucher podcasts and a book from my Sci-Fi and Fantasy book club as well. yes--I was buying these titles all as audio books. The reason is simple: I've kept myself incredibly busy for the past few years, and the main time I have for myself is my lunch hour, when I have been in the habit (since I started with my present employer in 2005) of taking a 3.5-mile walk around the perimeter of our office park. I found The Sword and Laser online book club not long after it was launched, and I began using Audible credits to download the audio books of the monthly selections and then listening to them during my lunchtime walk each day.

So for the first nine months or so of 2014, I was alternating a book I heard on Altucher's podcast and a book from my book club. All the titles were fascinating and inspiring, but almost all of them seemed to want to speak to an audience of already A-type readers that had already been trying to find the right life hack and simply needed guidance on a system.

But several of them actually gave me something I could use right away, and I did gain something from them. I'll tell you which ones they were in a moment, but it wasn't until July of 2015 that I stumbled onto two books that I think lay the foundation and are helping to point me in a direction to make all the wisdom from the other books that much more effective. After thinking about which books had the most immediate impact, and which ones build upon the principles taught in others, I've put together a personal "first five" list of book I would recommend. These are the ones that have helped me the most, in the order that I think their messages would be the most useful. This order may work for others also; all I can do is share what has seemed to work well for me.

My Personal First Five Recommendations

Book One: The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod



Earlier this month when I heard James Altucher interview Hal Elrod about his book, The Miracle Morning. During the interview, Hal mentioned a quote by the late Jim Rohn that he said had struck him powerfully, and it was like a thunderbolt to me when I heard it. Rohn once said, "Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development." It sounds a lot like things we've all heard said a thousand times before by everyone from parents, counselors, motivational authors and speakers, and even spiritual texts. But that quote immediately resonated as something I needed to hear, and even as I continued listening to the interview, I immediately went to Audible's order page and used a credit to get Hal Elrod's book. It was around 10:00 am, and I decided I would start listening to it during my lunch break that very day.

Indeed, Hal Elrod's book outlines a morning daily practice that fundamentally promotes personal development through a ritual of daily disciplines. In other books in the library I had built up, I had heard many times discussions of the importance of daily exercises for the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body. And The Miracle Morning's ritual of daily "Life Savers" hits all of those first thing out of bed and jump-starts your mindset for the day.

Book Two: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo



You may wonder what this has to do with personal development, but there's that old saying about a cluttered space reflecting a cluttered mind, and I really think that's true. In 2014, two elderly relatives passed away, so that left me with three households worth of stuff crammed into my small house, even after all the rest of the family members came and took away what they wanted. The piles and boxes and bags and clutter had just become overwhelming, and another common thread echoed in many of the books I had read was the concept of "elimination" to get rid of the need to worry about keeping track of so much stuff. I heard James Altucher first mention this book in late June or early July of 2015.

I have to admit there's a certain lazy streak in my personality has always made it difficult for me to keep a tidy house anyway, and this book has been an incredible revelation on how to actually tackle the overwhelming amount of stuff that is confronting me in my home. I have to be honest I just finished this book today and I spent a few hours starting on the author's method when I got home today. Mind absolutely blown. A process for tackling one task that I thought might take months was finished in a matter of a few hours. Granted, this was just the first step of many steps I need to take as I start decluttering my physical living space, but the confidence boost and the sense of accomplishment from seeing this first step completed is motivating me to really dive deeply into this process to get it completed throughout my house.

Book Three: Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy



Brian Tracy's book is a very practical guide to tackling those things in life that are really important but are quite unpleasant. These things differ from person to person, but the effect is always the same: these are the chores, assignments, presentations, projects, or other things that seem so daunting and so stressful that inevitably you simply wind up avoiding them.

I came across Brian Tracy from some of my other reading. It occurred to me that his name was one that had come up several times in multiple books I had read. It was finally while I was reading another book on this list, The Success Principles, that I stopped and took time to look up what he had written and select the best one that seemed most helpful to me. I came across this book in May of 2015.

I really like the book because it teaches concrete processes, systems, and strategies for dealing with things. I've been implementing Tracy's systems at work for the past couple of months and I'm already noticing better results. Now that I've started implementing Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning ritual, I've seen another quantum leap in the effectiveness of these processes, which is why I would recommend tackling Hal's book first.

Book Four: I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi



While Sethi's book has a pretentious title, it's more of a practical guide to making conscious decisions to control your money so that your financial situation doesn't wind up controlling you. If you have dreams of radically shifting your lifestyle, understanding and controlling your income is something that's going to be incredibly critical to sustaining that, so it's better to get a handle on it now and start mastering it. Once again, the foundational disciplines established in the first three books are something that will make implementing Sethi's teaching about handling your personal finances a lot easier than if you come to it before having the other disciplines already established (as was the case for me).

Ramit Sethi was interviewed on James Altucher's show in the first half of 2014, thus it was one of the first books I began working through in this list. It was a bit of a confidence booster because I found I was doing several things the way he recommended--or close to the way he recommended. He did offer me some suggestions for tweaking and improving my methods, which I found quite helpful.

Book Five: The Success Principles, by Jack Canfield



Jack Canfield is probably best known as the co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. He's also a motivational speaker and a great collector of practical wisdom. His Success Principles book goes into great detail about many of the different techniques and practices that you find discussed in the first four books on my list, as well as many other of the books in the personal development library I've been building.

Jack was interviewed on James Altucher's show in early 2015, talking about the 10th anniversary edition of this book. It's a very detailed, broad-spectrum book on many principles employed by a number of the most successful people around.

I include this one in my First Five list because I think it reinforces and ties together a lot of what the first four books have to offer, and it also acts as a catalyst or springboard to lead into a deeper study of whatever area of self-development you want to pursue next. For those with the lifestyle design itch, understanding the content of The Success Principles will make reading The 4-Hour Workweek that much more powerful and immediately useful. If you have dreams of entrepreneurship, then it would make books like Chris Gillebeau's The $100 Startup, or Peter Thiel's Zero to One that much more easy to implement immediately.

The other thing about Canfield's book is that moreso than any of the others it is filled with the powerful example of personal stories. For every one of the principles Canfield describes (and there are over sixty), there are stories of people who have achieved remarkable results through the use of each one.

If you are like me and have been motivated by some inspiring personal development or entrepreneurial or lifestyle design books but have been struggling to find a place to start, I hope this list will help. On the other hand, I have to say that these books in this order are the ones that seem to make the most sense to me and have been most helpful. I cannot say that you would find them the most helpful in this order. In fact, if you have suggestions or ideas of your own about the best order to start on your journey, I'd love it if you share that in the comments below.

Starting at Square One

I think all of us have experienced the momentary or passing thought about starting a business or building a brand or living a lifestyle independent of a "day job" where we have to report to a boss and punch a time clock (physically or otherwise).

Some people have done more than think about it and have registered small business names. I know I've done that in the past. Others still have actually made sales and enjoyed some limited success. My father did that for a brief time, running his own small business back in the 1970s and early 80s for a few brief years.

But it's rarer still to find people that have actually built companies that become household names. And it's more rare that you actually hear about it as it's happening. Usually they build huge companies, become celebrated entrepreneurs, and then sit around on their beach cabanas or custom yachts and reminisce to some author or reporter that tells a condensed and shortened story of how they went from zero to hero without really being able to capture or show the hard work along the way.

I'm optimistic, so I tend to think that my efforts will one day generate a comfortable stream of income for myself and my family, and I may stumble across an idea that turns my brand into a company that rivals Apple or Google or Coca-Cola for global recognition. However unlikely that may be, I want to capture (even if nobody else cares right now) the steps and starts and stumbles and challenges along the way. Then when someone wants to know the real story, I can give them the Cliff's Notes version and point them here for full details.

Telling Stories

I've always been a natural story-teller. My mom used to tell me that when I was in pre-K, my teachers would tell her that during free time I would entertain the other kids telling them stories, usually about some random toy or object that was in our play area. As I got older, I channeled this ability into a lot of what seemed like frivolous and fanciful efforts, such as making up backgrounds for characters of table-top RPGs (like Dungeons & Dragons) or creating alternate mythologies to explain the world of computer games I played because I didn't want to take time to read the lore of the game developers (such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft).

I took some creative writing in college, but "common sense" got the better of me and I majored in technical communications, which is a fancy way of saying I went to college to learn how to write online help and user manuals. Yes, that's pretty dry and boring stuff, and believe me it gets a bit boring communicating those essential details to users all the time.

People have always told me I am a good writer, but frankly the thought of cranking out a book-length manuscript always seemed a bit daunting to me, and I was always good at starting stories, but had a hard time ever coming up with a satisfying ending. In fact the only short story that I ever remember thinking was good enough to submit to any kind of a contest was one that featured a knight on a quest to rescue the princess from a vile dragon. As the story went, the knight tracked the beast to its lair, fought it to defeat, rescued the princess, and was rewarded by the king with his daughter's hand in marriage. But to the knight's great horror, on his wedding night as his bride gazed at him with a victorious grin he noticed her pupils had the same vertical reptilian pupils as the dragon he had supposedly slain. The story received an honorable mention but it did not get published in the anthology for which it had been submitted.

Later when Internet newsgroups were a new and fancy thing, I actually chronicled the adventures of a weekly gaming group in which I participated. I played a bard, so I would write the story of our heroic adventures (always making the bard as much the hero as possible, of course) and re-writing lyrics to popular songs of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s to tell of our tales. One day I actually received an email from someone who had just moved into our city and he said he had been reading my posts since he learned he would be transferred and he wanted to join our group. So I guess that means Tom was my first real fan.

Blogs without a Reason

Since I first heard about blogging, I thought there might be a way to scratch the creative storytelling itch I had, but they came out at a time when I was convinced that blogs needed to have a purpose to be monetized, and while I would get occasional inspiration to write about something, I had neither the depth of knowledge nor the time to conduct research in order to make sense of anything, so my posts were like shotgun blasts in different directions, scattered and devoid of a focus and purpose. Unsurprisingly they never really gained a following and I abandoned them pretty quickly. Instead, I focused on my day job that paid the bills and those hobbies that gave me most enjoyment for the least effort.

Breakthrough Inspiration

Actually the breakthrough moment that brought me my first idea generating a body of material that was actually focused and sustained over a lengthy period was a dramatic and catastrophic health concern that hit me in December of 2010. I was diagnosed with leukemia (acute myleoid leukemia, to be more precise) and was hospitalized on death's doorstep. Within about 48 hours of being diagnosed, I was informed that the strain of AML I suffered was among the most aggressive the doctors knew, and it could literally kill within six weeks or less of initial onset.

Obviously I survived since it's nearly five years later as I write this entry, but in the first day or so of hospitalization I exceeded my data, voice, and text limits on my phone wildly by answering so many questions from friends and distant relatives. So I hit on an idea. I had a pretty good network of facebook friends, and I decided once I had my father bring my laptop to me in the hospital that I would create a facebook page dedicated to my illness and just point all my friends there to find the daily and weekly updates on what was happening. On the one hand it was an effective communication tool. On the other, it gave me something productive to do instead of sitting around all day in a hospital bed being bored to tears.

This page produced months worth of detailed descriptions, notes, and raw material. And many friends and relatives told me I should turn it into a book. But almost as soon as I returned to work and was pronounced out of the woods for my health, my elderly father began a long, slow spiral downward. He held on for about three more years, spending the final six months of his life in an assisted living facility where he could get the 24-hour care he needed. But I was also dealing with an elderly uncle who passed away during the same period, and between caretaker roles and my full-time job and managing estate paperwork I didn't have much time to do anything but dream about something different or better.

But in the final year of my father's life I finally began to realize I didn't want to reach that stage regretting all the things I'd never done. As a result I began seeking out and reading and researching how to do something on my own and how to break out of the monotony of the nine-to-five world. That's safe and traditional, but that's not what I wanted.

And So It Begins

Thus, in the late spring of 2014 I began a daily discipline of listening to James Altucher's interviews on his current and back catalog of podcasts and making notes about books that would be helpful and ideas that were inspiring. James calls inspiration "the idea muscle" and he says that like any muscle it has to be exercised to grow. I knew I needed to generate ideas and over the course of the next few months I did.

In February of 2015 I launched my first blog with a real purpose. It's called The Lion's Teeth, and it's dedicated to the local MLS franchise, Orlando City SC. I spent money to have a logo created and made up business cards and it's developed a small but steadily growing following among fans, players, front office staff, and even fans spread around the world that have only heard about the team but don't follow it regularly.

In future posts I'll detail more about that blog, and also about the next step I've taken, only yesterday. You remember that inspiration I received when I was sick and the encouragement people gave me to write about it? Well, I'm finally doing it. I've launched an online campaign to raise the money needed to turn those notes into a physical book and an e-book. And I have a second related title planned, which will focus on the remarkable story of my bone marrow donor.

I'll also talk more about that campaign and the effort to get that project created in future posts. But for now I'll close with a few of the books that I've read over the last year that have been the most inspiring to me.

A Blog of Gratitude

There's a common theme you'll find in this blog, and that's gratitude. I'll share more about my past later, but the fact that I have access to a computer that is connected to Blogger and lets me share some of my thoughts makes me grateful.

If that's all I had to be grateful for, then you might wonder why I should be grateful. And if you have access to a computer or smart phone or tablet that you can use to read this blog, then I will tell you unequivocally that you should be grateful too. Oh, you shouldn't necessarily be grateful you can read my drivel, but you should recognize and be grateful for the power and freedom and access you have if you are able to read these words online.

We live in an age where almost every individual has nearly limitless possibilities. But I don't care about everyone else's possibilities, and right now you don't need to care about theirs either. I care about your possibilities, and you should as well. More about that in posts to come. First I'd like to share a little about me.

Who am I?

I was born before there was an Internet available to the general public or to mere students in high schools and universities. When I was born, networked computers were the domain of government agencies, university research labs, and corporate skunk works departments. In fact, I was in college before I went to a computer lab on campus and someone excitedly told me about this fantastic browser called "Netscape" and before I received a 3.5-inch "floppy" diskette advertising something called America OnLine in the mail--the snail mail... from the post office. Yes, kids--there was a time when data really was sent on diskettes that way.

I was born to working-class parents of very modest means. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a horticulturalist. That's a fancy way of saying that he worked in a commercial greenhouse and grew plants for a living. He didn't own the greenhouse--he worked for the greenhouse owner. He supervised people and he was supervised by other people. There can be a lot of money in some commercial greenhouse operations, but most of them are commodity businesses that work on very thin margins and only work because of economies of scale. They are labor intensive and costly to operate. Thus, they require a lot of labor and they pay agricultural wages.

So that is to say that the "tribe" from which I come is not a tribe of privilege nor of abundance in material terms. I did have the privilege of growing up in a household where my parents remained faithful to their marriage vows until my mother passed away from cancer. I also had the abundance of a grandmother that lived close by and served as a baby sitter and coach in life lessons from the time my mother went back to work after my birth until my parents decided I was old enough to trust with a key to the house when I caught the bus to school in the mornings. I know that not everyone has that luxury, and I recognize it both as a privilege and as abundance, and I am grateful for both of them.

But in some ways, it took me many decades to realize just how grateful I should be for those circumstances in my formative years, and it seems that many who have achieved great things in life started from far more humble means and were driven or forced from an early age to create, to innovate, or to hustle simply to survive. Those skills learned in the early years of "survival training" then led them to seek more and more, possibly out of an unspoken or even perhaps unrecognized (at least in a conscious sense) fear of returning to that desperate state from whence they began.

Others who have achieved great things were born into abundance and had the first-hand example of parents or family members whose hard work and genius for creation or innovation had helped build vast fortunes. These achievers are not the ones who grew up always expecting things to be done for them; these were the ones who grew up with the realization that their own work and genius could result in even more amazing and impressive achievements.

Lies My Father Believed

But I largely grew up believing lies that were told to me out loud and without words about the limitations of people like my "tribe." One of my father's favorite sayings was "Your actions speak louder than your words," and neither he nor I realized for decades just how incredibly true that is. My father's words always told me, "You can become anything you want, Son. You can do anything you set your mind to." On the other hand, my father's actions told me that men of our "tribe" wear clothes until they literally fall apart at the seams, live paycheck to paycheck, drive cars that were already high mileage and high maintenance at the time of acquisition, put up with the demands of taskmaster bosses that pay meager wages, and never consider that there could be a future better than the present.

My father embodied and lived out that lie--and he did so because it's what had been drilled into him since he was a child and what he saw around him. He never pushed beyond the limits of his own experience because for every voice or promise or dream that there could be something more to life, there were a hundred or a thousand voices telling him that fate had chosen his path for him and he had better just learn to accept that.

Like I said, my father spent his entire life believing and being constrained by those lies. He died in an assisted living facility where he required 24/7 care for several months that I simply could not provide myself because I was too busy caught and in danger of being crushed by the same lies that had prevented my father from ever truly living.

My Uncle's Driving Force: Passion

Meanwhile, my uncle (my mother's brother), who had died just a few months before my father, had been born in the same year as my father, and had been raised by parents who were much the same socio-economic creatures as my paternal grandparents. But my uncle had fallen in love with music at an early age, and from the time he was able to legally drive he held a job playing music in churches. Music was his passion, and he turned it into his career. Now anyone who has ever been a church musician knows that like teaching school or being employed in commercial agriculture, this is not a path to fame, fortune, and riches. Indeed, in addition to his "regular" job, my uncle taught keyboard and voice privately and he also taught in schools and universities for decades. But again--this was a passion he pursued.

By the time my uncle died he had visited all 50 states, taken trips to four or five continents, owned and restored modern and antique luxury cars, and lived very comfortably. As a result, he was active and enthusiastic and always looking forward to the next adventure even up until the day he collapsed and had to be rushed from his house to the hospital for the final time, just a few days before he died.

I am grateful for my father and grateful for my uncle both. I am especially grateful for the contrast in their lives that allowed me to look at the differences in how they both lived as I reflected on my uncle's death and prepared for the inevitability of my father's passing.

The Accidental Mentor

While I have so many reasons to be grateful to so many others, I'm going to end this post by saying I am grateful for someone else as well: for a man of whom I only became aware about 18 months ago. He's not a blood relative and he's not someone who presented himself as a salesman or a life coach or a guru or teacher even. But he is a man whose life experience has led him to share the importance of gratitude with the world through many channels. This man's name is James Altucher. And while neither James nor I realized it in January of 2014 when I first saw him speak at a conference in Miami, Florida that I paid to attend virtually, seeing and hearing his talk was a turning point in my life.

You see, several years before, back as early as 2009, I had begun to realize that a better future really was more than a pipe dream. I had internalized the lies that my father and I both had swallowed hook, line, and sinker for so long that I was utterly blind to the reason my uncle had not succumbed the same way my father had. But I could not shake the sense that the future could be better than my present if I could only figure out how to bridge the gap. But a whole set of other lies had put blinders on me that kept me from converting the idea of "pursue your passion" into action.

When I heard James speak at the Miami conference, a light bulb clicked on. He mentioned a free podcast that he did weekly, and I quickly bookmarked it and subscribed via iTunes. I began listening to this podcast and I began hearing these amazing interviews with incredible people that had all decided the "real world" wasn't good enough for them and so they would go invent their own path in life.

On his podcast, James has interviewed Silicon Valley billionaires, venture capitalists, social media celebrities, and world-renown entertainers and authors. And all of them have similar stories. The path from "there" (wherever you are and whatever your circumstances when listening) to "here" (wherever the life of the interviewee has taken them) is not nearly as complicated nor as rare nor as reliant on the fickle finger of fortune as everyone popularly believes. There is luck involved, yes, but only when you understand the true meaning of the word luck: preparation meeting opportunity.

Do the preparation, and the opportunity will appear. Do the preparation and the opportunity will appear. Do the preparation and the opportunity will appear. This is the message from every single episode of James's podcast.

And that message finally made everything click into place and finally started breaking down the lies from my past, and like the climactic scene in that classic Pink Floyd movie, it utterly and completely exploded the wall separating me from pursuing my own dreams. You see, popular mythology that we tell ourselves in the United States is merely another kind of lie. We call ourselves the "Land of Opportunity," as though opportunity is the whole sum of the equation. But opportunity without preparation is merely fantasy. Opportunities abound, but what we lack is a fundamental cultural understanding of the need for preparation. Without preparation, opportunity is meaningless. Without preparation, there can necessarily be no luck.

The secret--and it's one that many successful people, and certainly one that every unsuccessful person has never truly internalized and fundamentally understood--is that we CREATE our own luck. We bring it into being. It's not some cosmic happenstance; it's not some random chance. By doing the preparation, we are ready when the opportunity arrives as it inevitably and necessarily must.

So I'm dedicating this post to James Altucher, and in gratitude for what I've learned from him, I want to share that same opportunity with you. I'll give you two links to his podcasts, and two links to books of his that I've found incredibly helpful.

Pocast links:

• Stansberry Radio Network page
• iTunes page

Biographical sketch:

James Altucher on Wikipedia

Web Site:

JamesAltucher.com

Book links:

Choose Yourself



This book is all about biographical and autobiographical lessons that James learned from his own experience or that of others which helped lead him to the place he is today and the opportunity he has to share what he has learned with the world.

The Power of No



This book, written by James and his wife Claudia, reminds you that it's OK to say No. We are brought up to believe that Yes is always the right answer, which means a lot of times we say Yes to a lot of the wrong things--or things that ultimately are harmful or destructive to us. Learning to say No and learning when to say No are sometimes difficult habits, but can help you focus on what is most important: you!

If you have the money I highly recommend buying these books. If you don't have the money, then at least listen to his podcasts. Those are free, and the inspirational stories you will hear from James' guests and his unique interviewing style just might help you realize that the dreams you had given up as fantasy aren't so far-fetched after all.

More to Come

I said briefly at the top my purpose in writing this blog is to try to share some of the things I've learned from some amazing and inspiring authors. You'll find stories from my life in this blog and stories of successes and failures I've experienced. You'll also find a number of links to free resources online related to the summary. And when I recommend a book or an author, I will provide links to the web site as well as links to Amazon.com where you can purchase the book if you wish.